Marthe Béraud first came to attention when she
contacted the other world in Algiers in 1905, to
console her fiancé's parents after the death of their
son. The séances were so successful that her fiancé's
father, a French general, invited Charles Richet, a
professor of physiology at the Sorbonne who was well
known for his interest in psychic matters, to attend
them; Richet soon declared himself fully persuaded
that Béraud was genuine.

Not long afterwards, Marthe Béraud confessed to
trickery. She had little option: a newspaper had found
the servant who'd played the spirit she summoned -
that of Bien Boa, a courtly and richly moustachioed
16th-century Brahmin. Not for the first time, Richet
refused to admit that what he had witnessed was a

trick, and the medium, once she had changed her name,
continued to practise.

The support of scientists such as Richet and, earlier,
the pioneering physicist and Fellow of the Royal
Society William Crookes, who in the 1870s had
speculated about a fourth, 'radiant', state of matter,
lent authority to the cause of English psychic
research. When Dr Richet held séances in his villa on
the island of Roubaud in the South of France in the
summer of 1895, he invited the eminent philosophers
and scientists who, in 1882, had founded the Society
for Psychical Research.

They included the philosopher
Frederic Myers; the progressive thinkers Henry
Sidgwick, the founder of Newnham College, Cambridge,
and his wife, Eleanor Balfour, sister of the future
Prime Minister; and Oliver Lodge, a brilliant younger
scientist who continued to defend ectoplasm well into
the Einsteinian era. Richet had enlisted the Italian
medium Eusapia Palladino, another adept at setting
objects flying through the air, tumbling the furniture
about, forming ectoplasm and making absent people very
much present. After the Roubaud séances, she moved
back to Britain with Myers and the Sidgwicks to
continue the experiments in Cambridge.

There's something ghastly and shameful, as well as
inadvertently hilarious, about these high-minded and
progressive luminaries taking part in such
shenanigans; it's also a source of profound
embarrassment for those who believe in intellectual
effort that thoughtful men and women should have
colluded with such deceptions and, albeit
unconsciously, brought about a spiral of duplicity
with mediums who were for the most part female, and
invariably of a lower social status than the psychic
investigators. All this has meant that serious
attention has only recently been paid to the extent
and influence of the psychic enterprise, to the
legitimate contexts in which it arose, the resonance
of the questions it put, and the effect it had on
ideas of the self in psychology and literature.

Pamela Thurschwell's fine study of Henry James, Oscar Wilde
and George du Maurier (1) showed how profoundly the
developments in 'magical thinking' reverberated in
fiction and its portrayal of character and perception;
and Malcolm Gaskill recently tackled, with amused
brio, the life and times of the last of the
materialising mediums, Helen Duncan, who was
imprisoned for her activities and died only in 1956.(2)

In this lucid and richly layered study, Luckhurst
echoes Terry Castle's 'the invention of the uncanny'
(from The Female Thermometer ), to tell the story of
telepathy. Castle described the internalisation of
spectres, hauntings, terrors and the rise of the
phantasmal at the end of the 18th century, while
Luckhurst tracks a contrary yearning a hundred years
later for a stable, external explanation, moored in
science. Developments in the natural sciences and
psychology offered places for ghosts to rise up: in
'radiant matter', in vibrations of the ether, in the
organic sparking of synapses - not in the turbulent,
subjective and inexplicable fantasies of individual
persons. Luckhurst is eager to counter the emphasis on
decline and degeneration at the close of the Victorian
era, wanting to redescribe the epoch as one
invigorated by contact with new thinking from an ever
increasing number of new disciplines.

Telepathy embraced phenomena such as spirit
summonings, ectoplasmic manifestations, ghosts and
hauntings, according to the Society for Psychical
Research and its assiduous committees of
investigation, because all of them constituted action
at a distance produced by mind over matter. The word
itself was invented by Frederic Myers in 1882 - the
prefix tele- gave rise to a number of compounds during
this period that reflect the fluctuating and excited
climate of discovery: telegraph, telephone,
telekinesis, teleportation (television, manifestly
still of this world, followed later). Myers wanted to
replace 'thought transference', the phrase then
current, in part no doubt because he wanted to strike
a lofty and learned tone; but also because he wanted a
word that would mean not merely mind-reading but 'the
communication of impressions of any kind from one mind
to another, independently of the recognised channels
of sense'. The new word would be able to embrace
materialisations at séances: these ranged from the
filmy skin (paraffin wax) shed by spirit visitors, to
ghost thumbprints, cool lifting breezes, various sound
effects, and, of course, spirit apparitions and
ectoplasm.

The Society for Psychical Research sought to exclude
supernatural explanations, and their materialist
scepticism caused a rift with the Spiritualists. It's
a forgotten paradox that, unlike witch-hunters,
ghost-busters were fervent doubters, and tricksters
and conjurors such as Houdini rationalists to their
fingertips. However, several of the thinkers in the
SPR wavered in their allegiance to scientific
naturalism: for example, Myers, in his magnum opus,
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death ,
thought up the notion of 'subliminal consciousness', a
model in which the mind is never entirely present to
itself, but constantly impelled by inaccessible memory
layers. This was a material conception, not an idea of
the soul. But, at the same time, he made a pact with
friends that after his death he would return to speak
to them - if this were possible - in order to settle
the question of bodily survival.

Myers died in 1901, after being treated at a clinic in
Rome where William James was also a patient, and where
Axel Munthe looked after them both. Munthe went on to
write the dream-laden and spooked bestseller, The
Story of San Michele . As for Myers, he did indeed
return: he became a loquacious revenant, dictating
many messages in languages ancient and modern to
automatic writers far and wide; he had agreed a code
before his death, secured by several double blinds, so
that researchers would know his ghost. In returning to
haunt the living, Myers undercut his own argument that
telepathy involved effluvia or waves which
communicated between the living, and that apparitions,
ghosts of departed loved ones and other spectral
experiences existed in the mind and nowhere else. In
the late Victorian and Edwardian ages, the spectral
was never properly assimilated to the telepathic, and,
after the first world war, psychic studies had pretty
much given way to spiritualism. Like the many bereaved
who saw their loved ones again in spirit photographs,
the vehicles of Myers's communicating spirit preferred
to think he had indeed come back from the dead to
speak to them.

Luckhurst discusses the association of pathos and
touch, and finds an oxymoron in the term 'remote
touch, distant contact'. But the dominant meaning of
pathe is 'sensation', in the sense of emotion,
suffering, or feeling with someone or something, as in
sym pathy , the 'pathetic fallacy' or, in the coinage
of Vernon Lee which Luckhurst discusses, empathy .
Myers saw love as the basis of all telepathy, and his
own life-story, complicated by disavowed bisexuality,
melancholia and even unacknowledged fraudulence
(including plagiarism), constantly raises the matter
of prohibited relations. Yet touch, handling - epaphe
- became central to the activities of the psychic
researchers, who in imitation of the laboratory, did
not want to rely on the evidence of their eyes alone.
They wanted telepathic effects to be evident in ways
other than the visual: hence the darkness of séances,
the inventive panoply of raps, notes and other noises,
the floating trumpets that emitted disincarnate spirit
voices, the teleported flowers and phantasmal slaps
and pinches, the gooey, smelly, haptic qualities of
ectoplasm. The psychic moment involved, on the one
hand, an ideal of enhanced sensitivity of perception
between people and, on the other, a commitment to
impersonal evidence, unaffected by the subjectivity of
witnesses.

Luckhurst vividly describes William Barrett, a doctor
active in the Society for Psychical Research,
assisting John Tyndall, a leading scientific
naturalist, when Tyndall was demonstrating the effects
of sound on light at the Royal Institution in the
1860s. Shaking a bunch of keys, or chirruping, or
clapping loudly from a distance, Tyndall showed that
he could quell the flame of a Bunsen burner or make it
swell and roar. Extrapolating to telepathic effects,
Barrett later said that the flames reacted like a
'sensitive, nervous person uneasily starting and
twitching at every little noise'. The connection of
vibrating harmonies across space flowered easily into
figures of interpersonal contact, and we now
ordinarily speak of 'being on the same wavelength',
'having a brain wave', 'tuning in', 'switching on'.
Oliver Lodge invoked tuning forks reverberating to
each other's frequency and wrote that 'the sensory
consciousness of a person, though apparently located
in the brain, may also be conceived of as also
existing like a faint echo in space, or in other
brains.' Such finely calibrated sensors between
sensitive souls, such tremulous, responsive,
imponderably harmonised bodies, appear in the writings
of Henry James, Virginia Woolf (The Waves ) and even
Rudyard Kipling, as well as those of others mentioned
by Luckhurst, such as Arthur Machen, Vernon Lee and
Grant Allen.

The concept of telepathy continually threatened to
collapse distinctions between the literal and the
figural, and the psychological and the metaphysical.
As Luckhurst remarks, Henry James 'always ensures the
screw will bite with a further turn, the figural and
the literal kept maddeningly proximate'. The status of
ghostliness had preoccupied the Fathers of the Church
for much the same reason: were apparitions illusions
emanating from the devil? Or were they hooked up to a
truth in the objective world, whose creator ensured
their existence? Joan of Arc's trial returned
obsessively to this problem: were the voices in her
mind, in which case they might have been conjured by
the arch deceiver, Satan? Or were they ghosts of the
sort who often appeared to warn sinners to reform - no
diabolical tricks there.

Until Freud, dreams were in the main proleptic,
prophetic; they also, as we know from Homer and from
Julius Caesar , contained secret knowledge of what had
transpired but was still hidden from view: they were
not fantastic, nor were they subjective. Classical and
medieval ghosts enflesh - so to speak - concealed
knowledge; it is easy to see why ghosts later became
metaphors for the Freudian unconscious. Playing Hamlet
recently, Sam West delivered his soliloquies in the
midst of company on stage, thus conveying clearly that
these were his inner thoughts, which we in the
audience were overhearing: in other words, we were in
telepathic communication with his inner self. In
Hamlet and Macbeth , the status of ghosts is full of
tense ambiguities: the guards, as well as Horatio,
seem to have seen the ghost on the battlements, but
Gertrude later grieves that Hamlet is staring at thin
air, and Macbeth alone sees Banquo shaking his hoary
locks.

Discussing Freud's captivation in the 1920s by the
possibility of thought transference, Jacques Derrida
remarks that it is 'difficult to imagine a theory of
what they still call the unconscious without a theory
of telepathy'.(3)

Derrida also allows himself to wonder, as most of us have done, how it
is that someone rings us at the very moment we've put our hand
on the receiver to ring them. Modern media, he
suggests, do not simply move the self in the form of
the voice and image over distance, but give the eerie
feeling of replicating the movement of thought itself.
In his writing, telepathy keeps threatening to break
its confines and become the condition of thought, of
literature, of language.

The chainlink fence around telepathy has been
patrolled, usually more vigilantly than by Derrida,
because the occult poses such a threat to legitimacy:
the eminent figures in the SPR were keen not to be
thought cranks. Even worse, the occult has tended to
leak into the fascist, and distemper its adherents
(think of Pound, Yeats, Jung). Luckhurst tracks
Freud's struggle to keep psychoanalysis at a healthy
distance from the psychic and the occult, and to
define the unconscious against Myers's telepathic,
'subliminal' model. In Freud's conception, the
unconscious belongs to an individual, differentiated
and particular person: each to his or her own
unconscious. Myers's subliminal and irreducible - even
immortal - subconscious disintegrates into the
material world, deriving its being from the
Pythagorean or Hindu concepts of vital energy and
essences flowing through creation. Myers had absorbed
doctrines of the world soul and of metempsychosis from
his own background as a classicist and philosopher as
well as from his wide-ranging and esoteric reading.
(He wasn't alone, of course: theosophy was forged
through contact with Indian thought.) In other
territories of empire - West Africa and the Caribbean
especially - colonists, too, became acquainted with
models of self that dethroned uniqueness, and offered
up the individual to possession by external spirits:
the self became a haunted house, or a house ever apt
to become haunted. In its acceptance of the medium's
capacity to fall into trance and take on another's
thoughts, to become the habitation of a 'spirit
control', to speak in another's voice, to produce
someone else's ectoplasmic matter from inside her own
body, telepathy profoundly undermines the integrated
body-mind/ body-spirit/outside-inside model of the
Judaeo-Christian self, and, indeed, the Freudian
psyche. Luckhurst refers to the contrary idea of a 'je
anonyme' - an ego which is not I.

The medium in trance, herself ghosting the presence of
another, is haunted by the oracles of ancient Greece,
and by the shamans and behiques of Africa and the
Caribbean, whose magical powers over souls had been
noted in the earliest ethnography to come out of these
regions. Marthe Béraud's Bien Boa belongs to a large
congeries of exotic phantoms born of the encounter
with different cultures. Telepathy became a way of
absorbing strangeness, of neutralising its power
through contact but also, in a metaphor of
pharmacological magic, of revitalising the self
through its energy. Hélène Smith, a young Genevan
medium who starred in Dr Théodore Flournoy's
bestseller From India to the Planet Mars (1899),(4)
spoke in many tongues, including Martian. Her multiple
selves included Marie Antoinette, a 15th-century Hindu
princess called Simandini, and a reincarnation as the
Martian overlord Astané. Flournoy's account of their
séances and Smith's prodigious feats of channelling
went through edition after edition - and it's not
improbable that Marthe Béraud had come across it.
Astané travelled by means of a flying machine - a
hand-held flame-thrower which looked like a
combination between a loud hailer and a child's toy
girouette or windmill. This psychic Orientalism
persisted: Yeats was able to break his block thanks to
the mediumship of a succession of women, who between
them established a spirit control for the poet in the
shape of Leo Africanus, a Spanish-Arab scholar,
traveller and poet celebrated in 16th-century Italy.
The far-flung fantastic spectres of the Fin-de-Siècle
séance aren't simply ornamental: there to produce a
frisson of the unfamiliar. They embody, as Luckhurst
points out, the collapse of the distant into the
proximate brought about by empire. Imperial Gothic -
the infusion of exotic spooks into the literature of
hauntings - grew in step with modern communications:
Luckhurst shows how submarine cables, carrying the
telegraph between Britain's colonial possessions,
reproduced the spiritual web that put the past in
touch with the present, bringing the unimaginably
remote home to the parlour. The first transatlantic
cable joined two British territories - Ireland and
Newfoundland - in 1866; India was connected to
Gibraltar four years later, allowing communication
between Europe and the Subcontinent in five hours; the
last link was laid in 1903 between Canada and New
Zealand. These were 'the nerves of empire'. The most
important early theorist of psychic phenomena, William
Crookes, was introduced to spiritualism after his
brother died of a fever in Cuba, where he was laying a
cable.

At the same time as Myers and his colleagues in the
SPR were amassing evidence from all over the world of
out-of-body experiences and ghostly apparitions, the
anthropologist James Frazer was conducting an
investigation, also by post, into customs and beliefs
throughout the Empire. From 1887 onwards, Frazer sent
his questionnaire throughout the world as he saw it,
and this world coincided, pretty much, with the
British Empire: he asked missionaries, colonial
administrators, teachers, explorers and botanists to
inquire of their native informants the 'Manners,
Customs, Religion, Superstitions, etc of Uncivilised
or Semi-Civilised Peoples'. He was excited by other
peoples' ideas about spirits, about ways of summoning
them or controlling them, about their migration into
the body of animals, and the adventures of wandering
souls - although he despised the researches of the
SPR, he was willy-nilly wound into their telepathic
plots. One of his informants was Mary Kingsley, who
had explored the West Coast of Africa; according to
Luckhurst, Mary Kingsley declared that she could
'think black', and he relates this novel and proud
claim to the value accorded by psychic researchers to
the sensitivity of empathetic or telepathic exchanges.

The Invention of Telepathy traces the way in which
magical thinking about the mind unsettled notions of
the unique, integrated self, yet simultaneously made
subjectivity the only locus of experience. On the
basis of this riven notion of person and personhood,
writers have invented haunted plots, unreliable
memoirs, ghost stories and gothic romances. The
19th-century concept of telepathy continues to animate
alter egos, multiple personalities, ideas of
possession and altered states in work by writers from
Margaret Atwood to Joyce Carol Oates to Stephen King.
The alliance of entertainment media with magic,
telepathy and possession grows ever stronger, in
writing for children, in television programmes - even
the Teletubbies are psychic channellers - and, of
course, in the X-Files , horror films and video
nasties. The latest twist to the challenge posed by
telepathy to the idea of the integrated self
reconfigures in atomic terms the telepathic 'Not-I',
who can take on the impression of others' presence.
The particles of an element are identical, and through
this identicality, excite a hallucinatory sensation,
to the non-scientific mind, of personal uniqueness
vanishing into thin air: your DNA may be uniquely
yours, but its carbon content, well, that's another
matter. The 'I' as an enigmatic atomic cluster,
traversed by invisible waves and rays, so very like
every other and yet not like any other, has become the
new frontier of psychological inquiry.

(1) Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking,
1880-1920 (Cambridge, 208 pp., 5 July 2001).

(2) Hellish Nell: Last of Britain's Witches (2001),
Hilary Mantel.

(3) 'Telepathy' (translated by Nicholas Royle) was
published in the Oxford Literary Review (1988). Roger
Luckhurst has written on the same subject in
'Something Tremendous, Something Elemental: The
Ghostly Origins of Psychoanalysis' in Ghosts:
Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History , edited by
Peter Buse and Andrew Stott (1999).

http://mailbox.univie.ac.at/~muehleb9

=
Brian